


Kindly Remove That Spaghetti From My Sabacc Table

by dietplainlite



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Finnrey, Force-Sensitive Finn, Kinda Fluffy, domestic quibbles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 18:12:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7325371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dietplainlite/pseuds/dietplainlite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn and Rey are head over heels.  Living together should be easy, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kindly Remove That Spaghetti From My Sabacc Table

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cloama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloama/gifts), [seasalticecream32](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seasalticecream32/gifts), [putawayyourharpoon (MofBaskerville)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MofBaskerville/gifts), [PetraTodd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetraTodd/gifts).



> So many thanks to PetraTodd for the idea!

When Finn was FN-2187, he’d shared quarters with dozens of other troopers, in long low barracks equipped with nothing but a bed, shared nightstand, and foot locker for each soldier. Their schedules were proscribed so there was never a bottleneck at the showers. Lights out was strictly observed, and strictly silent.

Living with one woman shouldn’t have been a problem.

The main corps of the Resistance had moved to a base on Rylan 3, a small planet covered in grassland, orbiting a binary star.

Like the native wildlife, the Resistance burrowed underground, beneath the rolling plains, to better hide from flying predators.

Finn, used to life on a star destroyer, adapted well.  Natural light filtered into the dim tunnels via specialized transparisteel skylights, specially designed to match color and texture with the surrounding environment while still allowing light through.  They even adjusted to the varying colors of the grass as the seasons changed.

When Rey had arrived from Ach-To, windblown and somber, she had been fascinated with the skylights, and had received a gentle reprimand from the General when she tried to take one apart to see how it worked. After talking with the young woman, General Organa had introduced her to the head engineer, who showed her the schematics and let her help repair one of the panels.

Before long, it was well known that Rey had a “knack” for electronics and mechanical devices. She could often be found in one room or another, repairing a broken motivator, reprogramming a mouse droid or tinkering with an obsolete holocube.

Three months after Rey’s return, the couple requested shared quarters. 

On moving day, all of Finn’s possessions fit into a large duffle bag.  Having been on the base for ten months and only acquiring a few necessities and some leisure items, Finn was perplexed as box after box arrived from Rey’s room, some via service droid, others by levitation. They were of varying sizes and materials, some of them bursting at the seams. None were labelled.

Finn didn’t remember any of this being in her room.  Then again, they spent most of their time in his.

“That’s, um, a lot of stuff,” Finn said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Is it?” Rey shrugged.  “You  never know when you’re going to need something.”

Ah.  Finn should have known.  Of course Rey was used to holding onto anything she found that could possibly be useful someday. Still, it was impressive that she had managed to acquire this much stuff in three months. Maybe if they got a shelving unit they could organize it.

Rey agreed to the shelving unit, and it was installed the next day, fitted with uniformly sized bins. He helped her sort everything, letting her work out her own system of organization, and he even got her to throw out a big bag of caps and rings from beverage cartons.

“It’s okay. They’ll get used.  Turned into energy.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that’s alright.”

Finn left on a mission the next day, and when he returned he found her at the desk, working on an old blaster. Most of the bins were on the floor, items spilling out, and some were tipped over completely.

He started to ask what was going on, but she leaped from her chair and jumped into his arms, and he forgot about it for the rest of the evening.

 

Over breakfast the next morning, he asked if she’d been busy while he was away, keeping his voice light and casual.

“Swamped,” she said. “Jess has been teaching me some things about Starfighter repair, since all the ones on Jakku were so old. The new ones aren’t that different, though.  I think Jess needs something to do while she’s grounded.  I offered to heal her leg the rest of the way but I think it freaked her out a little and she said no. Oh, and of course I’ve been practicing Forms and meditation.”  She rolled her eyes at this. It was no secret how impatient she’d become with her training. Finn, still deciding whether he would train as a Jedi or use his abilities for something else, was not encouraged down the Jedi path by her attitude.

They ate in silence for a while, Rey wolfing down her eggs and pocketing two apples and a plum.

When she came back from getting a second helping, he asked how the system was working out.

Rey screwed her face up and shrugged.  “It’s okay.  But, you know, sometimes it’s easier to call things to me than worry about where exactly it is, so it doesn’t matter where it ends up.”

“But you put everything away at the end of the day, right?” Finn asked.

“Yes?” she said.

“That’s good, then.” 

Finn remained on base for two days before being sent away again, this time on an undercover mission to Coruscant.  When he came back a week later, he discovered Rey sitting in the floor building a small humanoid droid, about three feet tall.

All of the bins were on the shelves, neatly stacked, but they appeared to be filled to the brim, despite there being little piles of loosely related items all over the room.

He told himself he was too much of a neat freak.  His way of doing things was probably as foreign to her as her way was to him. She’d once asked him, lying in bed one night, how he felt safe only having a few things. “

“It’s how it’s always been,” he’d said. “I feel prepared because I can clear out at any moment, at the first sign of danger. Just like having things makes you feel prepared for anything.”

She’d smiled and cuddled into his side again, sighing before drifting off to sleep.

As she powered the droid up to test its legs, a warm feeling crept into Finn’s chest, replacing any annoyance he felt. Her genius was astounding, her smile radiant. He sat down with her as she explained how she hoped the droid would help with her work.

With bright eyes, she asked how his mission had gone, following up with a string of questions as she worked on the droid’s voice modulator. It hit him, halfway through telling her about the food on Coruscant, that she worked so much because she was desperate to be useful. General Organa and Luke would not send her out on any missions yet. The First Order had an enormous bounty on her head, payable only if she were captured alive. They all knew that mean they wanted her to use for leverage, or worse, to make her into a weapon. They could not risk her getting captured until she’d completed her training, but the training seemed interminable.

“Rey,” he said. She looked up from her work.  “You’re amazing.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” she said.

He stayed an entire week on base this time. He made sure Rey got more bins for her surplus gadgets and supplies, and she taught him some new things she’d learned about meditation. They spent one entire evening practicing mind tricks on each other, with varying degrees of success. The best part was when Finn managed to get Rey to go out into the hall, shriek like a loth cat, and come back inside.

When he left, saying goodbye was somehow harder.

When he returned, he palmed open the sliding door to their room and stopped cold.

Rey sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by an entire dismantled speeder. She’d pushed the bed aside to make room for it.

His dismay must have been visible, because her smile dropped away when she saw him. She couldn’t contain her excitement for long, though.

“I’m experimenting with putting a cloaking device on it. So it can be used on the surface,” she explained.  “I haven’t quite got Force camouflage down well enough to safely work up there, and there’s nowhere else.  So here I am!”

Finn looked at her, sitting there with tendrils of hair stuck to her face and streaks of oil across her forehead. He loved her so much that he almost told her that it was okay. She couldn’t change what she was, and she needed something to fill her days, which had always been busy, dawn to dusk.

But he also wanted to be comfortable in his own quarters, and the chaos made him itchy and anxious.

“Rey,” he said.  “We need to talk.”

 

They went to an empty conference room so that they’d be in neutral territory. During their talk, it came out that Rey had known how uncomfortable Finn was with the mess, but she didn’t know how to fix it. She didn’t want him to change just for her.

“We should talk with someone,” she said.  “Neither of us know anything from relationships other than what we’ve observed.  Maybe this is normal.”

The next day, they tracked down General Organa and asked to speak with her.  She told them she had fifteen minutes as long as they didn’t mind her eating at her desk.

After listening to their predicament, Leia put her fork down and smiled.  She began to speak, but her mouth quivered and laughter bubbled up from some well deep inside her, rich and musical.  They let her laugh for some time, tears streaming down her face.  Finally, she collected herself, wiping her eyes and taking a deep breath.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.  “I’m not laughing at you, I promise.  It’s just that the two of you are already fifteen steps ahead of many people decades older than you.”

“We are?” Rey said.

“Do you know how many couples we’d have heard shouting at each other? One or the other storming off, the two of them glaring across the canteen at each other? But you two talked it out and came for advice.  You’re going to be fine.”

Rey and Finn looked at each other, and back at the General.

“But what do we do?” Finn asked.  “We don’t want to make the other person change.”

“Have you ever considered,” she said. “That you don’t have to live together just because you’re a couple?”

“No,” Rey replied.  Finn shook his head.

“Han and I lived together perhaps a quarter of the time we were married, if you add it all up, even before…everything. It’s true that relationships require compromise, but we were so different that in order to live together, we would have needed to compromise so much that we would have lost ourselves. There are as many types of family units as there are planets in this galaxy. You don’t have to do what everyone else does.”

“Huh,” Rey said.  “It makes sense.  Finn is gone so much anyway, and it’s not like we have to keep to different rooms when he’s here.”

“It _was_ fine, before,” Finn said. And it really had been. Rey spent most of her nights in his room, but she also had her own space to go to, and he had his.  It had been wonderful.

“Maybe one day, you’ll have a house that’s big enough to accommodate you both. Until then, who’s to say you can’t treat Rey’s room like a workshop?”

Finn didn’t answer immediately. He envisioned the two of them in a home of their own. Definitely on a planet with trees, maybe by a lake or river.  The house didn’t have to be too big, only a few rooms. Maybe they’d have a garden.  Maybe one day, a child.

Once the war was over. Of course.

Until then, they could do this, in their current circumstances.  He looked at Rey and she gifted him with a soft smile.  No matter how different they were, they did their best in whatever circumstances were thrown their way.  Thrived, even.

He smiled and squeezed Rey’s hand. “Sounds like a plan.”


End file.
